Meat Pies!

Growing up in Fiji, meat pies were a part of everyday life. It is your afternoon snack after school or your dinner at the Royal Suva Yacht Club (who served the BEST meat pies). You can find meat pies at the local bodega or the Chinese take out place. They are everywhere. So this is my ode to my childhood of meat pies, always served with ketchup.

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350ºF degrees. Roll out your dough and line each pie tray with enough dough to cover the lip at the top. Using a fork, poke holes into the bottom. Then place parchment paper into the pie bottom and place pie weights into the dish to blind bake the crust. I could find nothing to blind bake with at work so I decided to use the tiny rocks from the driveway. They worked great!

Blind bake the crust for 10-15 minutes or until the crust turns a very light brown. Remove from oven and remove the weights and allow to cool.

Preheat your sauté pan over medium heat. Add olive oil and once heated add onions, garlic, carrots, celery and mushrooms. Cook for 5 minutes, while stirring occasionally, and then add your minced parsley, ½ tsp of salt and a few cracks of black pepper. Cook for another 5 minutes until vegetables are al dente.

Remove vegetables from heat and place in a bowl for use later. Add ½ tbs of butter to the same uncleaned pan and once melted, add your ground beef. Begin to break the beef up with your wooden spoon. Add ½ tsp. of salt and ¼ tsp. of black pepper. Cook until meat is crumbles and browned. Remove the meat from the pan while reserving 1 tablespoon of drippings in the sauté pan.

Keep the drippings over medium heat on the stove. Add the flour and cook for a good 2-3 minutes while stirring. Once flour has cooked, add the tomato paste and cook for another minute. Add the beef stock, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, and the remaining herbs: rosemary and thyme. Simmer these ingredients until the sauce thickens slightly. Then add the ground beef and vegetables back into the sauté pan. Mix everything together, then turn off heat. At this point, the filling may be refrigerated for 3 days before making pies.

Note: My filling is on the drier side because I like to eat meat pies on the go, and although the filling has tons of flavor—I get none of it on my pants! If you like more saucy pies, add more beef stock.

Once filling has cooled, ladle your filling into the bottom crust. The more filling the better, in my opinion. Take the egg and whisk it in a small bowl. Brush the edges of the filled pie crusts with your egg wash. Then place the top crusts onto the bottom crusts and press the seams together gently. Continue this process with all the pies.

Add the heavy cream to the remaining egg wash and then brush all the pie crusts and edges very well. Bake at 350ºF for 20-25 minutes or until crust is a beautiful golden color.

I ate mine with a simple salad and opened the top and dumped ketchup inside—it’s the Fijian (read:best) way of eating the pie! Enjoy! Xo

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Jamieson is a lover of all things edible. This led her to culinary school after graduating college. She’s done pretty much every job in a kitchenand now owns a seasonal restaurant, Mamasa, in Costa Rica. While she is home in the US for the rest of the year she works as a personal chef and nanny- hence, The Nanny Recipes. Jamieson is currently writing a cookbook that features her simple, easy and delicious recipes to help parents feed the entire family.

Hometown Pasadena publisher Kat Ward has known “Jamie,” as she used to be called, since she was a mere toddler back in the late 80s. Jamieson now owns Mamasa, an open air seasonal restaurant in Playa Grande, Costa Rica, and we at HP thought it would be fun to expand our recipe horizons, as well as start planning our next vacation somewhere between December and May (when Mamasa is open).